Acc/Ccgs/Wcg

Good thing I wasn't drinking anything when I read this.

I just made a comment in the IGS thread which is pertinent to this one. http://www.coincommunity.com/forum/...=11775#95352

To save myself the time for retyping my response, here's the copy and paste:

Bryan is quite correct. With over 120 unrated non-tiered fly-by-night slabbing companies out there, most of them established to overgrade and sell their own coins, a new slabber is guilty until proven innocent. Sure, a few may be honest attempts to compete with the biggies ANACS, PCGS, NGC, and ICG, but most are near-fraud or downright fraud. Any newbie is gonna be lumped in with the rest until proven otherwise.

My feeling is that for any new grading service which happens to be honest and independent of any coin sales to come into the market and actually have a chance for success will have to be a capital investment by a larger well-established organization, e.g., one of the auction houses which would then have to refuse to sell its own slabs, the ANA itself (which got out of the slabbing business years ago), or a financially well-endowed individual who is well-known in numismatics. Such an attempt would need to hire well-respected, well-known, and well-experienced graders and would have to have tons of bucks to back its bid for acceptance. This new slabber would also have to be extremely conservative in its grading, religiously stick to strict stated grading standards, would have to be scrupulously honest (no favoratism for large clients), would have to adopt differing and innovative policies such as no charge or a very low charge for a regrade, an iron-hard cast-in-concrete guarantee of its grades with no loopholes, and above all an attitude that "just maybe the customer IS right.

A boiler room slabber ain't gonna hack it no matter how good a grader s/he might be.

ADD: These slabbers listed will have to go a long way to prove themselves, especially CCGS which already has a bad reputation for overgrading and for the slabber selling his own slabs, a reputation I don't think it could possibly ever overcome. To overcome or even approach the biggies in reputation, they need to start out bid and become even bigger, not small and hope they grow with acceptance. One- or two-person slabbing companies ain't gonna make it. Again, guilty until proven innocent.

And I notice than NONE of the four listed have a money-back guarantee of their grades as do the top four TPGs. I've looked at a lot of these alphabet grading companies' websites (if they have one); only PCGS, NGC, ANACS, and ICG have such a money-back guarantee backing their grades.

Fred